National Instruments announced the release of the NI 8352 and NI 8353 server-class controllers for use in PXI or PXI Express systems. The NI 8352 and NI 8353 rack-mount controllers can be bundled with the appropriate MXI-Express or MXI-4 remote controllers for remote control of PXI or PXI Express chassis. The controllers provide computing performance and make it easy to achieve sustainable I/O bandwidth of up to 832 MB/s when bundled with a MXI-Express kit. With standard redundant array of independent disk (RAID) - configured hard drives for windows-based systems, these controllers are ideal for high-end test and measurement applications.

The new NI 8352 and NI 8353 rack-mount controllers of National Instruments are based on the Intel dual-core Core 2 Duo and quad-core Core 2 Quad processors, respectively. These multicore processors are designed to simultaneously execute multiple computing tasks on separate CPU cores. Using the multithreaded nature of NI LabVIEW software, test engineers can scale applications based on the total available number of cores and can benefit from faster, more flexible applications.

The new NI 8352 and NI 8353 controllers also work with a variety RAID storage configurations with multiple SATA II hard drives that support both RAID 0 (stripped) and RAID 1 (mirrored) configurations. RAID defines data storage schemes that divide and/or replicate data among multiple hard drives to provide increased reliability and/or increased file I/O performance. The new rack-mount controllers have up to four 250 GB hard drives with a maximum capacity of 1 TB and data read/write rates of up to 200 MB/s, a significant increase over the previous controllers. With these benefits, test engineers can record and playback data faster and for longer durations.

Also available is the NI 8353 RT controller, a version of the NI 8353 multicore-based controller that works with the LabVIEW Real-Time operating system. The NI 8353 RT takes advantage of the available quad cores on the Intel processor to increase performance for various real-time applications. With this enhancement, test engineers can build PXI- or PXI Express- based test, measurement and control applications with real-time response. Because of the modularity of PXI and open development environment of LabVIEW, test engineers also can create a custom real-time embedded solution using the NI 8353 RT controller with any number and combination of PXI/PXI Express plug-in modules. This makes it possible to achieve reliable and real-time performance for a multitude of applications.

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